Complex, cyber‐physical systems must be founded on a digital blueprint that provides the most accurate representation of the system by federating information from engineering models across multiple enterprise repositories. This blueprint would serve as the digital surrogate of the system and evolve as the actual system matures across its lifecycle, from conception and design to production and operations. This paper presents a graph‐based approach for realizing the digital blueprint, which we refer to as the Total System Model. The paper is divided into five parts. Part 1 provides an introduction to use cases for model‐based systems engineering. Part 2 introduces graph concepts for the Total System Model. Part 3 provides a demonstration of the graph‐based approach using Syndeia software as a representative application. Part 4 provides a summary of this paper, and Part 5 lays out potential directions for future work.
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